It was surprising to see Google Maps get a new look at the end of last year:

Though Google constantly tweaks Google Maps’s appearance, it rarely changes the look of the whole map at once.¹ And this is just the third time it’s happened:

But what makes this latest new look so surprising is that Google Maps had just gotten a completely new look sixteen months earlier in July 2016:

Google is changing Google Maps’s look increasingly often, and the lifespans of each look are shrinking:

So what’s Google up to?

Google usually changes Google Maps’s look when it adds major new datasets. For example, when Google added personalized data back in 2013...

...it once again revamped the map’s look so that the Areas of Interest would stand out amongst everything else:

So what did Google add this time?

Surprisingly, Google didn’t say—only telling us that it had changed the map’s colors and icons. But if we look closely at the new colors and icons, we can actually see the new dataset:

Notice what’s happening to the brown icons: they’re no longer brown on the new map. Instead, we see three new colors/categories:

In other words, Google’s new dataset is a new set of place categories—i.e., Google is creating new categories out of the old ones.

And Google is also refreshing all the category colors.

These new colors show us why Google Maps got a new look. Notice that when the new colors were added to the map, they weren’t as legible as the old ones:

So Google had to lighten the map’s background:

And then once Google lightened the map’s background, it adjusted the map’s other colors (water, parks, etc.) to better match it:

Google Maps’s latest redesign seems to be a continuation of the trends we first saw in “A Year of Google & Apple Maps”—i.e., over the past few years, Google has been gradually turning its map inside out, from a road map to a place map:

So has Google finished evolving its map? Or are there even more changes coming?

__

1  “Though Google constantly tweaks the map’s appearance, it rarely changes the look of the whole map at once.”

By “look”, I’m referring primarily to the map’s color scheme. Google often iterates each look before completely changing it. ↩︎